May is a very important month for parks all across the nation thanks to the National Park Trust's annual Kids to Parks Day. All throughout the month of May, local, state, and national parks will be hosting kid- and family-friendly activities that allow children to not only enjoy and discover outdoor recreation, but embrace their role as park stewards.
Last year, over one million families participated in Kids to Parks Day. On the National Park Trust website, participating parks listed over 1,200 events. This year (Kids To Parks Day officially being on Saturday May 18) they're on track to far exceed that amount, with their website full of educational and recreational activities around the US, as well as volunteer opportunities.
In Illinois, Lincoln Log Cabin State Historic Site is offering a free grilled garden pizza party to families that help with their spring garden planting. Families can join a ranger on a hike through sand dunes at the Dune Discovery Hike, thanks to Michigan State Parks. Children will have the chance to experiment with sand and climb the dune. In Delaware, families can learn how to rock climb at Alapocas Run State Park. Explore Topsail Hill Preserve State Park by finding 13 geocache locations in Florida, helping the park pick up trash as you go. View the moon at San Ridge Nature Center's planetarium in Illinois.
“It's fun to see how parks across the country are excited about this day, and are using it to promote all the great things happening at their parks,” said National Park Trust program manager Samantha Jones. “A lot of parks tell us that it helps bring out the local population, some of which never even knew about the park, even though they lived 15 minutes down the road.”
Our youth is a vital part to preserving our public lands for generations to come. [Photo/National Park Trust]
While the parks can submit their events here, the National Park Trust also does a lot of community outreach across the country to get parks involved. This includes calling mayors from the 50 states to get them to proclaim Kids to Parks Day in their towns, reaching people on a more local level.
The non-profit knows that park visitors are diverse, and one of their initiatives is focusing on the inner city schools that often don't have direct access to nature and park services. It's their hope, said Jones, that children from these Title I schools will reconnect with nature and their community through the programs offered on Kids to Parks Day.
Each year, the National Park Trust awards Title I schools with $1,000 as part of their Kids to Parks Day School Contest. This year, 66 schools received this funding, which goes towards transportation costs, program and stewardship project fees, and educational materials to encourage outdoor education, recreation, and stewardship.
The National Park Trust's mission is to not only preserve parks, but create park stewards for tomorrow.
“We realized that we weren't creating a pipeline of stewards, which is almost as important as preserving land,” explained Jones. “With no generation to take care of these parks in the future, our work isn't as successful as it could be.”
The National Park Trust was established in 1983 with the idea of connecting kids to parks “because kids need parks and parks need kids.” With the vision of giving everyone in the United States an “American Park Experience,” the organization knows this can only happen if they introduce current and successive generations and keep them involved. This can be done by building awareness and appreciation of national parks, but also by dedicating time to maintaining these public lands.
Parks are invited to sign up on the National Park Trust website, where events can be registered until the end of May. Most of their site traffic picks up mid-April, Jones noted, so it's best to submit events by then. The list of events that are already submitted can be found here.
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